How many times this week has your morning commute, or just plain driving to the grocery store, turned into a road-rage-inducing nightmare? A soccer mom steals your parking spot. A cell-phone guy cuts you off on the freeway. A student driver nearly rear-ends you at the mall. Take heart. Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage is all you need to lower your blood pressure and make you forget that jerk in the yellow SUV. A collection of more than one hundred very funny haiku (or honku), this book shines its brights on the dark side of America's car culture. Distilling the daily horrors of driving, parking, and ordering from the drive-through into a time-honored and respected verse form, Honku transforms annoying moments behind the wheel into the stuff of poetry and will leave you in a state of enlightenment and bliss. Well, at the very least it'll make you laugh. A diverting read that may inspire you to pen your own haiku, Honku is the perfect fit for the glove compartment, to be pored over while you're stalled in traffic on the interstate.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From storytelling phenomenon and hit podcast The Moth—and featuring contributions from Meg Wolitzer, Adam Gopnik, Krista Tippett, Andrew Solomon, Rosanne Cash, Ophira Eisenberg, Wang Ping, and more—a new collection of unforgettable true stories about finding the strength to face the impossible, drawn from the very best ever told on its stages Carefully selected by the creative minds at storytelling phenomenon The Moth, and adapted to the page to preserve the raw energy of stories told live, onstage and without notes, Occasional Magic features voices familiar and new. Inside, storytellers from around the world share times when, in the face of seemingly impossible situations, they found moments of beauty, wonder, and clarity that shed light on their lives and helped them find a path forward. From a fifteen-year-old saving a life in Chicago to a mother of triplets trekking to the North Pole to a ninety-year-old Russian man recalling his standoff with the KGB, these storytellers attest to the variety and richness of the human experience, and the shared threads that connect us all. With honesty and humor, they stare down their fear, embrace uncertainty, and encourage us all to be more authentic, vulnerable, and alive.

Now includes “The Life Inc. Guide to Reclaiming the Value You Create” In Life Inc, award-winning writer Douglas Rushkoff traces how corporations went from being convenient legal fictions to being the dominant fact of contemporary life. The resulting ideology, corporatism, has infiltrated all aspects of civics, commerce, and culture—from the founding of the first chartered monopoly to the branding of the self, from the invention of central currency to the privatization of banking, from the Victorian Great Exhibition to the solipsism of Facebook. Life Inc explains why we see our homes as investments rather than places to live, our 401(k) plans as the ultimate measure of success, and the Internet as just another place to do business. Most important, Rushkoff illuminates both how we’ve become disconnected from our world and how we can reconnect to our towns, to the value we can create, and, mostly, to one another. As the speculative economy collapses under its own weight, Life Inc shows us how to build a real and human-scaled society to take its place.

What can you do when the world is pushing you over the edge? More than you think. For some of us, it's the automated voice that answers the phone when we'd rather talk to a real person. For others, it's the fact that Starbucks insists on calling its smallest-sized coffee "tall." Or perhaps it's those pesky subscription cards that fall out of magazines. Whatever it is, each of us finds some aspect of everyday life to be particularly maddening, and we often long to lash out at these stubborn irritants of modern life. In Life's Little Annoyances, Ian Urbina chronicles the lengths to which some people will go when they have endured their pet peeves long enough and are not going to take it any more. It is a compendium of human inventiveness, by turns juvenile and petty, but in other ways inspired and deeply satisfying. We meet the junk-mail recipient who sends back unwanted "business reply" envelopes weighted down with sheet metal, so the mailers will have to pay the postage. We commiserate with the woman who was fed up with the colleague who kept helping himself to her lunch cookies, so she replaced them with dog biscuits that looked like biscotti. And we revel in the seemingly endless number of tactics people use to vent their anger at telemarketers, loud cellphone talkers, spammers, and others who impose themselves on us. A celebration of the endless variety of passive aggressive behavior, Life's Little Annoyances will provide comfort and inspiration to everyone who has ever gritted his teeth and dreamed of sweet retribution against the slings and arrows of outrageous people.

In the tradition of Peter Gzowski’s The Morningside Papers comes a book that celebrates the great stories and personalities behind As It Happens. For eight years, Mary Lou Finlay had the pleasure of being the co-host of one of CBC Radio’s most enduring institutions. On any given day she and Barbara Budd interviewed people on subjects varying from the Air India investigation to a man who invented a suit that would withstand an attack from a grizzly bear to a cheese-rolling contest in Cheshire. The As It Happens Files gives us the great stories – the hilarious eccentrics, the audience favourites, the poignant moments – that make up, for many Canadians some of the fondest, most vivid memories of the last decade.